We have done Budapest, had lunch in Bratislava and now moved on to the Cultural hub that is Vienna.
Needing a good base for a couple of days of exploration we pitched tent at a simple campground just outside of town. Rested up and rearing for some action we headed into town the next morning to tour the streets in search of the perfect coffee. Apparently Vienna is a coffee hub for the world…..I say apparently. Well taking the advice of our trusty Lonely Planet guide book we headed for a coffee house with a large pedigree and as we found, a price tag to suit. Well with expectations running high and my taste buds itching for some serious massaging, my hopes were pretty much squashed when our glamorous waiter hit the latte button on the coffee machine. Grrrr that was our first taste of Eastern Europe for a while and it was almost like we had forgotten how expensive things were and how money didn’t necessarily buy you coffee happiness.
Well with this disappointment we thought a Weiner from Wein (the locals name for Vienna) would cheer us up. And it did, so it was back to exploring as happy shiny peoples again.
Check out the sign, I don't make this stuff up....
Vienna is a maze of nice old city walkways littered with historical buildings, designer shops and large amounts of public artwork. It is a very nice city to just walk around. It was in one of the public squares that we stumbled upon a bubble making event where we got to show off some of our skill in front of a local tv crew. See the photos.
Well all sudded up and smug with our efforts we took to a spot of sunning in one of the central parks with the use of some free city chairs. Backing this up we had a nice lunch and Dids booked a spot at the Opera minus me. I was off to the campground for a relaxing bbq and a spot of the old beer. That is my opera baby.
Lazy chairs in the park
Well it was five or so hours later that Dids arrived back to find me on the beers with some French and Slovenian travelers having a good ol time. For those opera fans in the crowd, firstly I don’t know you and secondly the show was really good apparently. Anyways back to the Frenchies. One of the guys had earlier biked from Turkey through Iran and on and into Pakistan. He did it on his own and slept either on the side of the road or with any local that would let him in! Quite an amazing story. This time he and a mate were riding from France to eastern Europe. Unfortunately it was in Austria that his mate pulled up lame with a torn Achilles tendon. Ouch. So now they were hitch hiking and backpacking to complete their travels. Good luck to them, they are traveling on almost no money!
Well with friends made, Facebook contacts swapped and the car packed up again we were on to Innsbrook in Austria. I have to say, what a place! Both Dids and I rate Austria as the prettiest country we have seen yet and Innsbrook is a good example of this beauty. It is a smallish ski town at the base of some impressive Alps which frame it in an idyllic fashion. You simply need to see a couple of photos to understand this. Because of some rain on the day of our arrival, we opted for staying at a hostel for the night rather than pitching a tent. Breakfast was included in the price and what a breakfast! It just kept coming and the cheese cake at the end was a nice touch.
Insert one nice hat moment....
Fuelled up and feeling good, we took the opportunity to hop onto a ski lift and head for the top of one of the local slopes for a few hours of trekking. At the top of the mountain it was nothing but clouds and hail for a little while before clearing. Once the ice cleared there was nothing but a beautiful view! There is something about standing at the edge of a cliff and having clouds zoom past your face!
Innsbrook and surrounding mountain views
The view upward from the top of the cable car. We could have gone higher, but you know.
Yep, freshly cut
The view downward
What a mountain man. I had to displace a mountain goat for this shot.
3 hours later and with a few km’s under our belts we were at the bottom, back in the car and happy for once to let it do a bit of the traveling. On to Fussen, Germany and the start of the “romantic road” as it was dubbed. It was in Fussen that we saw the Walt Disney castle in person but unfortunately we could not stand up to the busloads of tourists and the demotivating number of costly hurdles you had to jump through to get around it up close.
Pulling up for the night we found a nice campsite that offered a free view of the castles from the tent. Get that into you the German Tourist Board! It was free, haHA!
Disney Castle. Actually it is the castle built by the mad king Ludwig of Bavaria
Well the romantic road was pretty disappointing. Bavaria is much flatter than we thought. Actually it is pretty much totally flat and the road seemed nothing more than farms and a few towns. After Austria I think we were a little jaded. So it was a big ol, stuff the romantic road and we were off to Koln for the night. Resisting the urge to indulge in the myriad of tantric massage parlors displayed throughout the local tourist information booklet (seriously) we poked our way around the city which had a cool cosmopolitan feel to it.
The mountains leaving Austria
It was the next day that turned out to be a highlight. Dids hopped in the car and said to me “lets travel to Antwerp for beer”. Nawww, it’s special when your girlfriend suggests this to you in the morning….
In Antwerp a spot in a cheap camping ground allowed us to save some money which was soon redirected to our quest for beer. Using our Lonely Planet again, we tracked down a pub which was rated as the best place in Antwerp't (or maybe Belgium, I can remember) to drink beer. Well bugger me, the book worked and we found ourselves face to face with some 700 different beer varieties each with their own individual glasses. Belgians do beer really, really well! In the pub all you had to do was ask the nice lady in your most composed, least intoxicated demeanor if she had a beer of such and such a flavour. The answer was always yes, yes they did. We had honey, cherry, Champagne, chocolate, licorice etc, etc beers. Mmmmmm! I don’t think Dids was expecting the beers to be so strong though, some were 12% alcohol! Hence the following drunken photo…. Haha! The camera doesn’t lie!
No explanations needed....
The pub
The beer rating system
The next morning we suppressed a nights drinking with a Belgium Waffle, a heap of pastries and some bitter as coffees before heading off to Monster and later Julianadorp in the Netherlands to visit my family again.
From the Netherlands, Dids will be heading back to the UK for 10 days to see her family and I will be off to Denmark for a Nordic adventure of the epic variety. Maybe I’ll come back with a real life Viking? You never know, I do have a spare seat in the car….
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